Nude Traffic: When Have We Crossed the Double Yellow Line?

“I hate to break it to you, but there are seductive pictures of you in lingerie floating around the web.” I was mortified. That was the gist, several months ago, from a friend gingerly alerting me to the news that some suggestive—and presumably private—photos had made their way into the public domain.

I was both relieved and shocked to see that the pictures purporting to be me, were not me. While I wouldn’t mind having the figure of this “Monica” (no cellulite), I was disturbed by the notion that people might think I’d posed in this way and given permission to have them released (or, worse, been paid for them). On a normal-size screen the model looked more like a Kardashian than a Lewinsky. But on smaller handheld devices, I could see some resemblance.

In the last week or two, as new batches of nude celebrity pictures have circulated around the Web—again violating the privacy of the women depicted—I was reminded of the few moments of sheer panic I had undergone before I realized my photos were not real. I felt compassion for these young women.

After all, I do know a little something about how the Internet can violate one’s privacy.

In 1998, more than 20 hours of surreptitiously audiotaped (and often inane) “girl talk” between my putative friend Linda Tripp and me (conversations that were largely about diets and the detritus of everyday life) were published on C-SPAN. This is a far cry from the horror of having one’s personal cache of nude photos hacked and disseminated worldwide, but the searing embarrassment and stinging humiliation are still there.

For all of our Instagram-enabled narcissism these days, there is no small degree of assault involved in having our private thoughts, our private conversations, our private photos dished up for the amusement and entertainment of the masses. Like so many others, I feel outrage—as a fellow victim, as a civilized individual, and as a woman—when other women are so easily and publicly violated. And I have found myself wondering: Have we become a world of pathetic voyeurs? Are we turning into scruffy old men in dirty raincoats slouched in the back row at the Gotham City theater? Or, millions of Tom the Tailors, about whom the phrase “Peeping Tom” was coined—after the character who peered through his shutters as Lady Godiva rode the streets of Coventry? (Let’s not forget that, according to legend, he was then struck blind.)

Perhaps Lena Dunham, the creator and centerpiece of HBO’s Girls, said it best with a Tweet earlier this month: “Remember, when you look at these pictures you are violating these women again and again. It’s not okay.” Helen Lewis, in a column for the New Statesman(I write this from London) went even further, characterizing these acts as “terrorism” against women.

We seem to have a much higher tolerance for the Internet’s or the media’s preoccupation with shaming when the victims are famous people. It’s interesting to note, for example, that many Brits, as desensitized to these incidents as anyone else online is, gave a collective shrug when celebrities’ answering machines were hacked; they only rose up in arms when it was revealed that the now-defunct News of the World had intercepted and deleted voicemails of a 13-year-old English girl, Milly Dowler, who was abducted while on her way home from school in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey.

But should we be making such a distinction? Of course not. It is immaterial that the recently purloined photos revealed under-dressed celebrities. And, yet, being human we often find ourselves torn between our own right to privacy and our dissolute desires as voyeurs and gossips in an image-and trivia-fueled culture. How much we indulge our inquiring minds is an individual choice. But certainly we can agree that stolen private nudes of actresses (or of anyone, really) is crossing the double yellow line.

When the horse and buggy were replaced with the Model T, there were few rules of the road. Ultimately, we devised stricter regulations on which everyone could agree. Speed limits. Stop signs. And double yellow lines that were not to be crossed. (The analogy to the Internet is obvious: in its earliest days the Web was referred to as the informationhighway. And still today, every single-page view is called “traffic.”)

But, there’s a fallacy here. Whoever “polices” the internet is one step away from the thought police. And freedom of information is so sacred, we cannot risk losing it. So, who is going to make the distinction between what we need to know and what is considered crossing the line, to ensure information can be freely exchanged but violations of society’s standards will be—here it comes . . . censored? In these fractured and fractious times, is the risk of anyone wielding that much power too great?

In 1997 Arnaud De Borchgrave gave an informal talk at the Georgetown Club in Washington, D.C. The prescient topic was “cybercrime.” Like many of those in the audience, I was only vaguely familiar with the term and most likely could not imagine its real-world implications. But cybercrime is now a daily fact of life and it is not unreasonable to expect our legal system to protect us. We can draw an imaginary double yellow line in that road and prosecute the miscreants who cross it.

When you can see hacked, private nude photos, we have crossed a line. And we’ve been saying this for years, in other contexts, for other transgressions. The line was crossed with paparazzi chasing Princess Diana to her death; with Rutgers student Tyler Clementi’s suicide after having his privacy invaded and paraded; with the hacking of Milly Dowler’s voicemail.

And now we confront these photographs. We wring our hands after each incident: clandestine shots of Diana working out at the gym; stolen sex tapes being sold to the highest bidder; Chris Brown and Rihanna’s domestic-violence police report leaked to the public. And yet we seem to return again and again to the Fountain of Schadenfreude.

So what should be done about cases like this? There are various options, according to attorney Nancy Libin, a long-time specialist in this field, who has served as the chief privacy and civil-liberties officer for the Justice Department. In Libin’s view: “First, hackers should be prosecuted. But because the Internet is borderless and many of these criminals are in foreign countries, they can be very difficult to trace. We need to make sure we expand global cooperation by getting more nations to sign the cybercrime treaty and extradition treaties so these criminals can be brought to justice. More countries have to take a stand and recognize that this is something really pernicious. Second, there are far better security precautions that many companies need to take. Many of them are not doing enough, and they leave their users vulnerable. Third, people need to take personal responsibility for the security of their own data, using better passwords, for example. Finally, the president’s Privacy Bill of Rights, which was introduced in 2012, has sort of languished. The White House has promised to revive it and submit it to Congress for a vote.”

According to Libin, photo hacking is “sort of death by a thousand cuts. Until there’s some BP oil spill equivalent for the Net, people are not going to take it seriously enough.”

I doubt that the nude-photo flap is that game-changer. But these measures are a start—and a step back over that double yellow line.